Midwest Gaze

The Equality Federation, the national alliance of state-based LGBT advocacy organizations, elected Fair Wisconsin executive director Katie Belanger to its board of directors during the group’s annual summer meeting. Belanger was also elected to serve as board secretary.

Belanger said she’s honored to serve.

A transgender woman said she was ridiculed by hospital staff and denied treatment when she went to a Muncie, Ind., emergency room coughing up blood.

Officials at Ball Memorial Hospital said they are investigating Erin Vaught’s allegations, which triggered complaints from advocacy groups.

Hundreds of women’s health advocates honored outgoing Gov. Jim Doyle in July with the first-ever Planned Parenthood Advocates of Wisconsin Lifetime Achievement Award.

“Wisconsin women have never had a greater champion in the governor’s office than Jim Doyle,” said Planned Parenthood president Teri Huyck. “Under his leadership, more women’s health policies have become law now than at any other time in Wisconsin history.”

A Wisconsin corrections officer claims he was demoted for blowing the whistle on a prison warden who made anti-gay slurs about gay staff and inmates, physically assaulted subordinates and abused overtime pay provisions.

Scot Galligan, a longtime supervisory corrections officer at Kettle Moraine Correctional Institution, said he alerted superiors several times concerning warden Michael A. Dittmann’s abusive behavior. After no action was taken, he began openly recording his conversations with Dittmann.

A conservative legal group says it will appeal a federal judge’s decision to throw out a lawsuit brought by an Eastern Michigan University student who says she was kicked out of a master’s degree program because of her religious views against homosexuality.

Julea Ward says she was removed from Eastern’s counseling program because she refused to counsel gay clients, saying she believed homosexuality was morally wrong.

Prosecutors say two men from Chicago’s southwestern suburbs are facing hate crime charges after allegedly shouting anti-gay slurs in Arabic at a woman in a Hickory Hills restaurant and then punching and kicking her.

The two are also accused of taking the 34-year-old woman’s cell phone, keys and wallet.